Chapter Text
It was nearly midnight when Trevor saw a large silver car pulling into the shop. He had the late shift at an auto repair shop that served odd hours. The nights were generally pretty quiet, just the occasional client coming by unannounced, and he couldn’t remember the last time a minivan came in after 8 pm.
A young man emerged from the vehicle, that is, Trevor assumed he was young since he looked around the same age as him. Yet the man looked like he hadn’t had a proper sleep in weeks. He was tall, with short, brown, well-styled hair. He wore such a soft looking sweater with a short scarf tied around his neck that Trevor felt relaxed just looking at him, until he noticed that the man himself seemed to be worrying about a dozen things at once.
‘Hi.’ this customer said, somehow formally. ‘Can I get my brakes checked? They’ve been squealing.’
‘Yeah, for sure, no problem.’ Trevor replied. ‘How long has it been going on?’
‘…’ The hesitation caused Trevor to brace himself.
‘…A year’ the man admitted. And, before Trevor could respond,
‘and three months’
Trevor only sighed. Some customers were proactive with their vehicles, but many more put things off as long as possible. He could name most of the problems that happened from putting off car maintenance, since most of those problems came in at night. Sure, some customers could only fit errands in at odd hours, around their work, but cars had this funny manner of never breaking down during convenient business hours.
Belatedly, Trevor realized he had just been staring at the other man, who was looking at him expectantly. He would pretend as though he was just lost in thought, but, gun to his head, he might admit that it was slightly related to the fact that the customer was distractingly attractive. It was something about the way he held himself, maybe. He seemed both confident and guarded.
‘We might just have brake pads that fit your car around here somewhere, someone else came in with a Galaxy last week before deciding to change the brakes themselves. You’re lucky,’ As he was speaking, Trevor started rummaging through a large cardboard box labeled "unclaimed" and pulled out an unopened yellow box of brake pads.
‘I’m rarely lucky’ the man replied bitterly.
‘…Right, this should take me about half an hour, I don’t have anything else lined up tonight. How does ₤120 sound?’
The customer (barely) visibly relaxed, ‘Yes! Yes that’s great! I- that’s better than I expected.’
Somehow, Trevor felt candid enough to laugh and admit ‘Cheap rent. We’re on the worst road in Cornley. We can afford to lower the prices. And, no other place is tapping the second shift market.’
While paying, Chris smiled. ‘Thank you, by the way.’ He said. ‘I hardly have time to deal with anything, really, during the day. This shop is a lifesaver.’
As Trevor started to look at the wheels, he noticed that the customer, Chris, hadn’t moved.
‘You can sit down if you’d like, we’ve got chairs in the waiting room.’ Trevor nodded toward the office a few meters away. Then, to his surprise, he continued, ‘Though, I could use some company. This week has been real quiet.’
Chris seemed momentarily trapped in place, having turned his torso toward the waiting area almost automatically, and turned back when Trevor finished speaking. He must have been deciding, looking back and forth between Trevor at his front tire and the bright fluorescent lights of the waiting room. His feet seemed glued to the floor and his face betrayed a hint of discomfort before relaxing again.
‘I’ll linger, I suppose. Just don’t let me get in your way.’
Trevor laughed. The customer was already standing about a meter away from everything: the car, his tools and even Trevor himself. To get in the way from there would require some drastic movement.
There was a few moments of silence between them.
Chris watched as the mechanic bent down to his front tire. He marvelled at the man’s forearms as he twisted the car jack. The sleeves of his boiler suit were rolled up, and Chris was fascinated by how flattering the uniform was. Though, he supposed it depended on the person wearing it. This person looked to be in his mid-twenties, around Chris’ age, and the way his thighs filled out his suit caused the fabric to wrap tightly around them. Chris imagined he could see the muscles move as he stood up to grab the tire iron off the worktable. Then Chris’s eyes were drawn to the way the waistband cinched his waist in, almost imperceptibly, while still loose enough to shift around whenever the man moved. Trevor put the tire down and slid the first two brake pads off with ease.
‘See this?’ Trevor held up a brake pad towards Chris. ‘When it gets down to the last quarter inch it’s got to be changed.’
‘Oh.’ Chris said simply. Frankly, he didn’t really know what Trevor meant, and he had never seen a new brake pad, so he wasn’t quite clear on how he was meant to catch it sooner.
After replacing those brake pads and while he moved to the next tire, Trevor’s curiosity got the better of him. ‘You don’t have to answer this, but I’m curious. Why do you drive an MPV? You don’t seem the sort of person who would need one.’
‘Hm?’ Chris seemed distracted, watching him work. ‘It seemed the most practical. And I got it used for a decent price.’
‘Fair enough.’ Trevor replied. ‘Do you drive a lot of people around then? Seven seats is quite a lot!’
‘And sometimes hardly enough. No, I use it more for storage, that is, moving large items in the back. But sometimes we do all pile in.’ He said thoughtfully.
‘We?’ Trevor prompted.
‘Oh! I’m a di-rec-tor’ Chris said proudly, and with a strangely precise intonation. ‘For the Cornley drama society. We’re at the theatre down the road. I got it so we only need one driver, sometimes two, when we have more of a stage crew. Though, most of the time, the back seats are down. You wont believe how many props I can fit in here.’
Trevor immediately decided that he ought to see a show from this drama society, when he could find the time. Only out of professional curiosity, of course.
Within half an hour, the mechanic finished replacing the brakes. Chris thanked him, and tried to ignore how there was something about this man that made his stomach flip. He had a show opening in a week and could not let himself get distracted by an unrequited crush on a stranger that he would likely never see again. He just put his key in the ignition, and backed his vehicle out of the garage.
Trevor was often busy. Not only did he work as a mechanic, but three days a week he worked the reception at a swimming pool, which bored him half to death, but meant he had more money to fall back on. He wasn’t much one for going out on the town, let alone socializing once he was out, but he still felt fairly content. After all, he was able to afford rent on his own, despite having been kicked out by his parents at 17.
He always liked working with his hands, and working on cars suited him well, but his spare time was what he looked forward to the most. As long as he could remember, he’d been obsessed with movies, and more specifically, the cool gadgets and weapons that really only seemed to exist on screen. For years he played around with cardboard and paint, until he started learning more techniques: sculpting, EVA foam and paper-mâché. His place was slowly filling up with the props that he made himself. He was always working on a project, and if a step was portable or repetitive, he would sometimes work on it during downtimes at the mechanic shop.
It was a few months before Trevor got the chance to see a performance by the Cornley drama society, but that cute customer would keep crossing his mind and he’d wind up looking at their website for showtimes again. Naturally, his evenings were full, but they had a matinee that he could just barely catch before work. It was an archaeology-inspired adventure, like Indiana Jones, set in the 1920s. The story seemed quite basic, and yet Trevor was enjoying it.
He was surprised to see that Chris was playing the protagonist; hadn’t he said he was the director? But… He did seem to suit to role. Or, at least, he was probably pretty enough. Trevor wasn’t really the one to ask about acting skills or casting decisions.
The other actors seemed to have some quirks that stood out to him. The woman playing the love interest, a pilot and journalist, seemed to pose and purse her lips after each of her lines. At least she remembered them, though. There was another actor who Trevor could have sworn was holding a script the entire play. He was a professor, responsible for a lot of the exposition, and from the first scene to the last, no matter the occasion, he would be holding an old hardcover reference book. Maybe it was a character choice, but even a well-read professor might close their book if they were being chased by bats through dark tunnels. Not to mention the fact that he would abruptly stop talking whenever he turned a page in the book.
All in all, the show was a nice break from work and during the intermission Trevor downed his coffee and planned to make theatre-going a new habit.
Things went south in the second act. The fact that three set pieces fell within the span of a minute made him wonder if most everything onstage was held by a single piece of duct tape and a dream.
Worst of all was that goddamned torch. A literal, on fire torch, was brought onstage by Chris as his character was exploring a secret tomb. And OF COURSE his foot caught on the plank of wood acting as the threshold, causing him to sway briefly. He winced as he adjusted his balance, clearly forgetting the torch as it brushed against the painted canvas backdrop behind him. By the time another actor had extinguished the fire, a hole the size of a movie poster had settled into the stone wall of the tomb, and Chris grimaced, holding up his blackened stick while saying his next line.
‘Seems like no one’s been here for centuries, we must be careful not to disturb such a tranquil place.’